The Great Towns

A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without
reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which
could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a
strange thing. This colossal centralisation, this heaping together of two and a
half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this
two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised London to the commercial
capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand
vessels that continually cover the Thames. I know nothing more imposing than
the view which the Thames offers during the ascent from the sea to London
Bridge. The masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from
Woolwich upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer
and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the
middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one
another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself,
but is lost in the marvel of England's greatness before he sets foot upon
English soil. [3]

But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After
roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty
through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the
slums of the metropolis, one realises for the first time that these Londoners
have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to
bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city; that a
hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been
suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply
through union with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has
something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds
of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not
all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest
in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same
way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had
nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is
the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to
delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour
another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling
isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and
offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited
space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the
individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our
society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious
as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into
monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here
carried out to its utmost extreme.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is
here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book [The Ego and Its Own],
people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and
the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot; and that
the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to
the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of
all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand,
and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man's house
in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of
the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the
consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised,
and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together.

Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence
and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on, it
is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor.
For him no man has the slightest concern. Cast into the whirlpool, he must
struggle through as well as he can. If he is so happy as to find work, i.e., if
the bourgeoisie does him the favour to enrich itself by means of him, wages
await him which scarcely suffice to keep body and soul together; if he can get
no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which
case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive
manner. During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have
died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury
has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the
matter. Let the testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal,
the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always finds some backdoor
through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation. The
bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own
condemnation. But indirectly, far more than directly, many have died of
starvation, where long-continued want of proper nourishment has called forth
fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might
otherwise have remained inoperative brought on severe illness and death. The
English working-men call this "social murder", and accuse our whole society of
perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are they wrong?

True, it is only individuals who starve, but what security has the
working-man that it may not be his turn tomorrow? Who assures him employment,
who vouches for it that, if for any reason or no reason his lord and master
discharges him tomorrow, he can struggle along with those dependent upon him,
until he may find some one else "to give him bread"? Who guarantees that
willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry,
thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really
his road to happiness? No one. He knows that he has something today and that it
does not depend upon himself whether he shall have something tomorrow. He knows
that every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of
trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he has temporarily
saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep his head
above water. He knows that, though he may have the means of living today, it is
very uncertain whether he shall tomorrow.

Meanwhile, let us proceed to a more detailed investigation of the position
in which the social war has placed the non-possessing class. Let us see what
pay for his work society does give the working-man in the form of dwelling,
clothing, food, what sort of subsistence it grants those who contribute most to
the maintenance of society; and, first, let us consider the dwellings.

Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded
together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of
the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where,
removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can.
These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the
worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one- or two-storied
cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always
irregularly built. These houses of three or four rooms and a kitchens form,
throughout England, some parts of London excepted, the general dwellings of the
working-class. The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with
vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul,
stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused
method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings here live
crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men's
quarters may readily be imagined. Further, the streets serve as drying grounds
in fine weather; lines are stretched across from house to house, and hung with
wet clothing.

Let us investigate some of the slums in their order. London comes first, [4] and in London the famous rookery of St.
Giles which is now, at last, about to be penetrated by a couple of broad
streets. St. Giles is in the midst of the most populous part of the town,
surrounded by broad, splendid avenues in which the gay world of London idles
about, in the immediate neighbourhood of Oxford Street, Regent Street, of
Trafalgar Square and the Strand. It is a disorderly collection of tall, three-
or four-storied houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in which there is
quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except that,
here, people of the working-class only are to be seen. A vegetable market is
held in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and
hardly fit to use obstruct the sidewalk still further, and from these, as well
as from the fish-dealers' stalls, arises a horrible smell. The houses are
occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance
is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them. But all this
is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys
between the streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which
the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. Scarcely a whole
window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-frames
loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or altogether wanting in
this thieves' quarter, where no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal.
Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied
before the doors gather in stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor,
the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution
indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction,
and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds
them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist
the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.

Nor is St. Giles the only London slum. In the immense tangle of streets,
there are hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts lined with houses too bad
for anyone to live in, who can still spend anything whatsoever upon a dwelling
fit for human beings. Close to the splendid houses of the rich such a
lurking-place of the bitterest poverty may often be found. So, a short time
ago, on the occasion of a coroner's inquest, a region close to Portman Square,
one of the very respectable squares, was characterised as an abode "of a
multitude of Irish demoralised by poverty and filth". So, too, may be found in
streets, such as Long Acre and others, which, though not fashionable, are yet
"respectable", a great number of cellar dwellings out of which puny children
and half-starved, ragged women emerge into the light of day. In the immediate
neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre, the second in London, are some of the
worst streets of the whole metropolis, Charles, King, and Park Streets, in
which the houses are inhabited from cellar to garret exclusively by poor
families. In the parishes of St. John and St. Margaret there lived in 1840,
according to the Journal of the Statistical Society, 5,566 working-men's
families in 5,294 "dwellings" (if they deserve the name!), men, women, and
children thrown together without distinction of age or sex, 26,850 persons all
told; and of these families three-fourths possessed but one room. In the
aristocratic parish of St. George, Hanover Square, there lived, according to
the same authority, 1,465 working-men's families, nearly 6,000 persons, under
similar conditions, and here, too, more than two-thirds of the whole number
crowded together at the rate of one family in one room. And how the poverty of
these unfortunates, among whom even thieves find nothing to steal, is exploited
by the property-holding class in lawful ways! The abominable dwellings in Drury
Lane, just mentioned, bring in the following rents: two cellar dwellings, 3s.,
one room, ground-floor, 4s.; second-storey, 4s. 6d.; third-floor, 4s.;
garret-room, 3s. weekly, so that the starving occupants of Charles Street
alone, pay the house-owners a yearly tribute of £2,000, and the 5,566 families
above mentioned in Westminster, a yearly rent of £40,000.

The most extensive working-people's district lies east of the Tower in
Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, where the greatest masses of London
working-people live. Let us hear Mr. G. Alston, preacher of St. Philip's,
Bethnal Green, on the condition of his parish. He says:

"It contains 1,400 houses, inhabited by 2,795 families,
comprising a population of 12,000. The space within which this large amount of
population are living is less than 400 yards square (1,200 feet), and it is no
uncommon thing for a man and his wife, with four or five children, and
sometimes the grandfather and grandmother, to be found living in a room from
ten to twelve feet square, and which serves them for eating and working in. I
believe that till the Bishop of London called the attention of the public to
the state of Bethnal Green, about as little was known at the West-end of the
town of this most destitute parish as the wilds of Australia or the islands of
the South Seas. If we really desire to find out the most destitute and
deserving, we must lift the latch of their doors, and find them at their scanty
meal; we must see them when suffering from sickness and want of work; and if we
do this from day to day in such a neighbourhood as Bethnal Green, we shall
become acquainted with a mass of wretchedness and misery such as a nation like
our own ought to be ashamed to permit. I was Curate of a parish near
Huddersfield during the three years of the greatest manufacturing distress; but
I never witnessed such a thorough prostration of the poor as I have seen since
I have been in Bethnal Green. There is not one father of a family in ten
throughout the entire district that possesses any clothes but his working
dress, and that too commonly in the worst tattered condition; and with many
this wretched clothing forms their only covering at night, with nothing better
than a bag of straw or shavings to lie upon."

The foregoing description furnishes an idea of the aspect of the interior of
the dwellings. But let us follow the English officials, who occasionally stray
thither, into one or two of these workingmen's homes.

On the occasion of an inquest held Nov. 16th, 1843, by Mr. Carter, coroner
for Surrey, upon the body of Ann Galway, aged 45 years, the newspapers related
the following particulars concerning the deceased: She had lived at No. 5 White
Lion Court, Bermondsey Street, London, with her husband and a nineteen-
year-old son in a little room, in which neither a bedstead nor any other
furniture was to be seen. She lay dead beside her son upon a heap of feathers
which were scattered over her almost naked body, there being neither sheet nor
coverlet. The feathers stuck so fast over the whole body that the physician
could not examine the corpse until it was cleansed, and then found it starved
and scarred from the bites of vermin. Part of the floor of the room was torn
up, and the hole used by the family as a privy.

On Monday, Jan. 15th, 1844, two boys were brought before the police
magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and
immediately devoured a half-cooked calf's foot from a shop. The magistrate felt
called upon to investigate the case further, and received the following details
from the policeman: The mother of the two boys was the widow of an ex-soldier,
afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard time since the death of her
husband, to provide for her nine children. She lived at No. 2 Pool's Place,
Quaker Court, Spitalfields, in the utmost poverty. When the policeman came to
her, he found her with six of her children literally huddled together in a
little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the
seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup, and a small dish.
On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old
rags as would fill a woman's apron, which served the whole family as a bed. For
bed clothing they had only their scanty day clothing. The poor woman told him
that she had been forced to sell her bedstead the year before to buy food. Her
bedding she had pawned with the victualler for food. In short, everything had
gone for food. The magistrate ordered the woman a considerable provision from
the poor-box.

In February, 1844, Theresa Bishop, a widow 60 years old, was recommended,
with her sick daughter, aged 26, to the compassion of the police magistrate in
Marlborough Street. She lived at No. 5 Brown Street, Grosvenor Square, in a
small back room no larger than a closet, in which there was not one single
piece of furniture, In one corner lay some rags upon which both slept; a chest
served as table and chair. The mother earned a little by charring. The owner of
the house said that they had lived in this way since May 1843, had gradually
sold or pawned everything that they had, and had still never paid any rent. The
magistrate assigned them £1 from the poor-box.

I am far from asserting that all London working-people live in such want as
the foregoing three families. I know very well that ten are somewhat better
off, where one is so totally trodden under foot by society; but I assert that
thousands of industrious and worthy people – far worthier and more to be
respected than the rich of London – do find themselves in a condition unworthy
of human beings; and that every proletarian, everyone, without exception, is
exposed to a similar fate without any fault of his own and in spite of every
possible effort.

But in spite of all this, they who have some kind of a shelter are
fortunate, fortunate in comparison with the utterly homeless. In London fifty
thousand human beings get up every morning, not knowing where they are to lay
their heads at night. The luckiest of this multitude, those who succeed in
keeping a penny or two until evening, enter a lodging-house, such as abound in
every great city, where they find a bed. But what a bed! These houses are
filled with beds from cellar to garret, four, five, six beds in a room; as many
as can be crowded in. Into every bed four, five, or six human beings are piled,
as many as can be packed in, sick and well, young and old, drunk and sober, men
and women, just as they come, indiscriminately. Then come strife, blows,
wounds, or, if these bedfellows agree, so much the worse; thefts are arranged
and things done which our language, grown more humane than our deeds, refuses
to record. And those who cannot pay for such a refuge? They sleep where they
find a place, in passages, arcades, in corners where the police and the owners
leave them undisturbed. A few individuals find their way to the refuges which
are managed, here and there, by private charity, others sleep on the benches in
the parks close under the windows of Queen Victoria. Let us hear the London
Times:

"It appears from the report of the proceedings at
Marlborough Street Police Court in our columns of yesterday, that there is an
average number of 50 human beings of all ages, who huddle together in the parks
every night, having no other shelter than what is supplied by the trees and a
few hollows of the embankment. Of these, the majority are young girls who have
been seduced from the country by the soldiers and turned loose on the world in
all the destitution of friendless penury, and all the recklessness of early
vice.
"This is truly horrible! Poor there must be everywhere. Indigence will
find its way and set up its hideous state in the heart of a great and luxurious
city. Amid the thousand narrow lanes and by-streets of a populous metropolis
there must always, we fear, be much suffering – much that offends the eye –
much that lurks unseen.
"But that within the precincts of wealth, gaiety, and fashion, nigh the
regal grandeur of St. James. close on the palatial splendour of Bayswater, on
the confines of the old and new aristocratic quarters, in a district where the
cautious refinement of modern design has refrained from creating one single
tenement for poverty; which seems, as it were, dedicated to the exclusive
enjoyment of wealth. that there want, and famine, and disease, and
vice should stalk in all their kindred horrors, consuming body by body, soul by
soul!
"It is indeed a monstrous state of things! Enjoyment the most absolute,
that bodily ease, intellectual excitement, or the more innocent pleasures of
sense can supply to man's craving, brought in close contact with the most
unmitigated misery! Wealth, from its bright saloons, laughing – an insolently
heedless laugh – at the unknown wounds of want! Pleasure, cruelly but
unconsciously mocking the pain that moans below! All contrary things mocking
one another – all contrary, save the vice which tempts and the vice which is
tempted!
"But let all men remember this – that within the most courtly precincts
of the richest city of God's earth, there may be found, night after night,
winter after winter, women – young in years – old in sin and suffering –
outcasts from society – ROTTING FROM FAMINE, FILTH, AND DISEASE. Let them
remember this, and learn not to theorise but to act. God knows, there is much
room for action nowadays." [5]

I have referred to the refuges for the homeless. How greatly overcrowded
these are, two examples may show. A newly erected Refuge for the Houseless in
Upper Ogle Street, that can shelter three hundred persons every night, has
received since its opening, January 27th to March 17th, 1844, 2,740 persons for
one or more nights; and, although the season was growing more favourable, the
number of applicants in this, as well as in the asylums of Whitecross Street
and Wapping, was strongly on the increase, and a crowd of the homeless had to
be sent away every night for want of room. In another refuge, the Central
Asylum in Playhouse Yard, there were supplied on an average 460 beds nightly,
during the first three months of the year 1844, 6,681 persons being sheltered,
and 96,141 portions of bread were distributed. Yet the committee of directors
declare this institution began to meet the pressure of the needy to a limited
extent only when the Eastern Asylum also was opened.

Let us leave London and examine the other great cities of the three kingdoms
in their order. Let us take Dublin first, a city the approach to which from the
sea is as charming as that of London is imposing. The Bay of Dublin is the most
beautiful of the whole British Island Kingdom, and is even compared by the
Irish with the Bay of Naples. The city, too, possesses great attractions, and
its aristocratic districts are better and more tastefully laid out than those
of any other British city. By way of compensation, however the poorer districts
of Dublin are among the most hideous and repulsive to be seen in the world.
True, the Irish character, which under some circumstances, is comfortable only
in the dirt, has some share in this; but as we find thousands of Irish in ever
great city in England and Scotland, and as every poor population must gradually
sink into the same uncleanliness, the wretchedness of Dublin is nothing
specific, nothing peculiar to Dublin, but something common to all great towns.
The poor quarters of Dublin are extremely extensive, and the filth, the
uninhabitableness of the houses and the neglect of the streets surpass all
description. Some idea of the manner in which the poor are here crowded
together may be formed from the fact that, in 1817, according to the report of
the Inspector of Workhouses,[6] 1,318
persons lived in 52 houses with 390 rooms in Barrack Street, and 1,997 persons
in 71 houses with 393 rooms in and near Church Street; that:

"foul lanes, courts, and yards, are interposed between this
and the adjoining streets .... There are many cellars which have no light but
from the door .... In some of these cellars the inhabitants sleep on the floors
which are all earthen; but in general, they have bedsteads .... Nicholson's
Court ... contains 151 persons in 28 small apartments ... their state is very
miserable, there being only two bedsteads and two blankets in the whole
court."

The poverty is so great in Dublin, that a single benevolent institution, the
Mendicity Association, gives relief to 2,500 persons or one per cent of the
population daily, receiving and feeding them for the day and dismissing them at
night.

Dr. Alison describes a similar state of things in Edinburgh, whose superb
situation, which has won it the title of the modern Athens, and whose brilliant
aristocratic quarter in the New Town, contrast strongly with the foul
wretchedness of the poor in the Old Town. Alison asserts that this extensive
quarter is as filthy and horrible as the worst districts of Dublin, while the
Mendicity Association would have as great a proportion of needy persons to
assist in Edinburgh as in the Irish capital. He asserts, indeed, that the poor
in Scotland, especially in Edinburgh and Glasgow, are worse off than in any
other region of the three kingdoms, and that the poorest are not Irish, but
Scotch. The preacher of the Old Church of Edinburgh, Dr. Lee, testified in
1836, before the Commission of Religious Instruction, that:

"I have never seen such a
concentration of misery as in this parish," where the people are without
furniture, without everything. "I frequently see the same room occupied by two
married couples. I have been in one day in seven houses where there was no bed,
in some of them not even straw. I found people of eighty years of age lying on
the boards. Many sleep in the same clothes which they wear during the day. I
may mention the case of two Scotch families living in a cellar, who had come
from the country within a few months.... Since they came they had had two
children dead, and another apparently dying. There was a little bundle of dirty
straw in one corner, for one family, and in another for the other. In the place
they inhabit it is impossible at noonday to distinguish the features of the
human face without artificial light. – It would almost make a heart of adamant
bleed to see such an accumulation of misery in a country like this."

In the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Dr. Hennen reports a
similar state of things. From a Parliamentary Report, [7]it is evident that in the dwellings of the poor of Edinburgh a
want of cleanliness reigns, such as must be expected under these conditions. On
the bed-posts chickens roost at night, dogs and horses share the dwellings of
human beings, and the natural consequence is a shocking stench, with filth and
swarms of vermin. The prevailing construction of Edinburgh favours these
atrocious conditions as far as possible. The Old Town is built upon both slopes
of a hill, along the crest of which runs the High Street. Out of the High
Street there open downwards multitudes of narrow, crooked alleys, called wynds
from their many turnings, and these wynds form the proletarian district of the
city. The houses of the Scotch cities, in general, are five or six-storied
buildings, like those of Paris, and in contrast with England where, so far as
possible, each family has a separate house. The crowding of human beings upon a
limited area is thus intensified.

.....the house," says an English journal in an article upon
the sanitary condition of the working-people in cities, "are often so close
together, that persons may step from the window of one house to that of the
house opposite – so high, piled story after story, that the light can scarcely
penetrate to the court beneath. In this part of the town there are neither
sewers nor any private conveniences whatever belonging to the dwellings; and
hence the excrementitious and other refuse of at least 50,000 persons is,
during the night, thrown into the gutters, causing (in spite of the scavengers'
daily labours) an amount of solid filth and foetid exhalation disgusting to
both sight and smell, as well as exceedingly prejudicial to health. Can it be
wondered that, in such localities, health, morals, and common decency should be
at once neglected? No; all who know the private condition of the inhabitants
will bear testimony to the immense amount of their disease, misery, and
demoralisation. Society in these quarters has sunk to a state indescribably
vile and wretched.... The dwellings of the poorer classes are generally very
filthy, apparently never subjected to any cleaning process whatever,
consisting, in most cases, of a single room, ill-ventilated and yet cold, owing
to broken, ill-fitting windows, sometimes damp and partially underground, and
always scantily furnished and altogether comfortless, heaps of straw often
serving for beds, in which a whole family – male and female, young and old,
are huddled together in revolting confusion. The supplies of water are obtained
only from the public pumps, and the trouble of procuring it of course favours
the accumulation of all kinds of abominations."

In the other great seaport towns the prospect is no better. Liverpool, with
all its commerce, wealth, and grandeur yet treats its workers with the same
barbarity. A full fifth of the population, more than 45,000 human beings, live
in narrow, dark, damp, badly-ventilated cellar dwellings, of which there are
7,862 in the city. Besides these cellar dwellings there are 2,270 courts, small
spaces built up on all four sides and having but one entrance, a narrow,
covered passage-way, the whole ordinarily very dirty and inhabited exclusively
by proletarians. Of such courts we shall have more to say when we come to
Manchester. In Bristol, on one occasion, 2,800 families were visited, of whom
46 per cent occupied but one room each.

Precisely the same state of things prevails in the factory towns. In
Nottingham there are in all 11,000 houses, of which between 7,000 and 8,000 are
built back to back with a rear party-wall so that no through ventilation is
possible, while a single privy usually serves for several houses. During an
investigation made a short time since, many rows of houses were found to have
been built over shallow drains covered only by the boards of the ground- floor.
In Leicester, Derby, and Sheffield, it is no better. Of Birmingham, the article
above cited from the Artisan states:

"In the older parts of the town there are many inferior
streets and courts, which are dirty and neglected, filled with stagnant water
and heaps of refuse. The courts of Birmingham are very numerous in every
direction, exceeding 2,000, and comprising the residence of a large portion of
the working-classes. They are for the most part narrow, filthy, ill-ventilated.
and badly drained, containing from eight to twenty houses each, the houses
being built against some other tenement and the end of the courts being pretty
constantly occupied by ashpits, etc., the filth of which would defy
description. It is but just, however, to remark that the courts of more modern
date are built in a more rational manner, and kept tolerably respectable; and
the cottages, even in old courts, are far less crowded than in Manchester and
Liverpool, the result of which is, that the inhabitants, in epidemic seasons,
have been much less visited by death than those of Wolverhampton, Dudley, and
Bilston, at only a few miles distance. Cellar residences, also, are unknown in
Birmingham, though some few are, very improperly, used as workshops. The low
lodging-houses are pretty numerous (somewhat exceeding 400), chiefly in courts
near the centre of the town; they are almost always loathsomely filthy and
close, the resorts of beggars, trampers, thieves and prostitutes, who here,
regardless alike of decency or comfort, eat, drink, smoke and sleep in an
atmosphere unendurable by all except the degraded, besotted inmates."

Glasgow is in many respects similar to Edinburgh, possessing the same wynds,
the same tall houses. Of this city the Artisan observes:

The working-class forms here some 78 per cent of the whole
population (about 300,000), and lives in parts of the city "which, in abject
wretchedness, exceed the lowest purlieus of St. Giles' or Whitechapel, the
liberties of Dublin, or the wynds of Edinburgh. Such localities exist most
abundantly in the heart of the city – south of the Irongate and west of the
Saltmarket, as well as in the Calton, off the High Street, etc.– endless
labyrinths of narrow lanes or wynds, into which almost at every step debouche
courts or closes formed by old, ill-ventilated, towering houses crumbling to
decay, destitute of water and crowded with inhabitants, comprising three or
four families (perhaps twenty persons) on each flat, and sometimes each flat
let out in lodgings that confine – we dare not say accommodate – from fifteen
to twenty persons in a single room. These districts are occupied by the
poorest, most depraved, and most worthless portion of the population, and they
may be considered as the fruitful source of those pestilential fevers which
thence spread their destructive ravages over the whole of Glasgow."

Let us hear how J. C. Symons, Government Commissioner for the investigation
of the condition of the hand-weavers, describes these portions of the city: [8]

"I have seen human degradation in some of its worst phases,
both in England and abroad, but I did not believe until I visited the wynds of
Glasgow, that so large an amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed
in any civilised country. In the lower lodging-houses ten, twelve, and
sometimes twenty persons of both sexes and all ages sleep promiscuously on the
floor in different degrees of nakedness. These places are, generally, as
regards dirt, damp and decay, such as no person would stable his horse in."

And in another place:

"The wynds of Glasgow house a fluctuating population of
between 15,000 and 30,000 persons. This district is composed of many narrow
streets and square courts and in the middle of each court there is a dung-hill.
Although the outward appearance of these places was revolting, I was
nevertheless quite unprepared for the filth and misery that were to be found
inside. In some of these bedrooms we [i.e. Police Superintendent Captain Miller
and Symons] visited at night we found a whole mass of humanity stretched out on
the floor. There were often 15 to 20 men and women huddled together, some being
clothed and others naked. Their bed was a heap of musty straw mixed with rags.
There was hardly any furniture there and the only thing which gave these holes
the appearance of a dwelling was fire burning on the hearth. Thieving and
prostitution are the main sources of income of these people. No one seems to
have taken the trouble to clean out these Augean stables, this pandemonium,
this nucleus of crime, filth and pestilence in the second city of the empire. A
detailed investigation of the most wretched slums of other towns has never
revealed anything half so bad as this concentration of moral iniquity, physical
degradation and gross overcrowding.... In this part of Glasgow most of the
houses have been condemned by the Court of Guild as dilapidated and
uninhabitable – but it is just these dwellings which are filled to
overflowing, because, by law no rent can be charged on them."

The great manufacturing district in the centre of the British Islands, the
thickly peopled stretch of West Yorkshire and South Lancashire, with its
numerous factory towns, yields nothing to the other great manufacturing
centres. The wool district of the West Riding of Yorkshire is a charming
region, a beautiful green hill country, whose elevations grow more rugged
towards the west until they reach their highest point in the bold ridge of
Blackstone Edge, the watershed between the Irish Sea and the German Ocean, The
valleys of the Aire, along which stretches Leeds, and of the Calder, through
which the Manchester-Leeds railway runs, are among the most attractive in
England, and are strewn in all directions with the factories, villages, and
towns. The houses of rough grey stone look so neat and clean in comparison with
the blackened brick buildings of Lancashire, that it is a pleasure to look at
them. But on coming into the towns themselves, one finds little to rejoice
over. Leeds lies, as the Artisan describes it, and as I found
confirmed upon examination:

"on a slope running down towards the river Aire, which
meanders about a-mile-and-a-half through the town, and is liable to overflows
during thaws or after heavy rains. The higher or western districts are clean
for so large a town, but the lower parts contiguous to the river and its becks
or rivulets are dirty, confined, and, in themselves, sufficient to shorten
life, especially infant life; add to this the disgusting state of the lower
parts of the town about Kirk-gate. March-lane, Cross-street and Richmond-road,
principally owing to a general want of paving and draining, irregularity of
building, the abundance of courts and blind alleys, as well as the almost total
absence of the commonest means for promoting cleanliness, and we have then
quite sufficient data to account for the surplus mortality in these unhappy
regions of filth and misery.... In consequence of the floods from the Aire"
(which, it must be added, like all other rivers in the service of manufacture,
flows into the city at one end clear and transparent, and flows out at the
other end thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse), "the
dwelling-houses and cellars are not infrequently so inundated that the water
has to be pumped out by hand-pumps, on to the surface of the streets; and at
such times, even where there are sewers, the water rises through them into the
cellars,[9]
class>creating miasmatic exhalations,
strongly charged with sulphuretted hydrogen, and leaving offensive refuse,
exceedingly prejudicial to human health. Indeed, during a season of inundation
in the spring of 1859, so fatal were the effects of such an engorgement of the
sewers, that the registrar of the North district made a report, that during
that quarter there were, in that neighbourhood, two births to three deaths,
whilst in all the other districts there were three to two deaths. Other
populous districts are wholly without sewers, or so inadequately provided as to
derive no advantage therefrom. "In some rows of houses, the cellar dwellings
are seldom dry"; in certain districts there are several streets covered with
soft mud a foot deep. "The inhabitants have from time to time vainly attempted
to repair these streets with shovelfuls of ashes; and soil, refuse-water, etc.,
stand in every hole, there to remain until absorbed by wind or sun.... An
ordinary cottage, in Leeds, extends over no more than about five yards square,
and consists usually of a cellar, a sitting-room, and a sleeping chamber. This
small size of the houses crammed with human beings both day and night, is
another point dangerous alike to the morals and the health of the
inhabitants."

And how greatly these cottages are crowded, the Report on the Health of the
Working-Classes, quoted above, bears testimony:

"In Leeds, brothers and sisters, and lodgers of both sexes,
are found occupying the same sleeping-room with the parents, and consequences
occur which humanity shudders to contemplate."

So, too, Bradford, which, but seven miles from Leeds at the junction of
several valleys, lies upon the banks of a small, coal-black, foul-smelling
stream. On week-days the town is enveloped in a grey cloud of coal smoke, but
on a fine Sunday it offers a superb picture, when viewed from the surrounding
heights. Yet within reigns the same filth and discomfort as in Leeds. The older
portions of the town are built upon steep hillsides, and are narrow and
irregular. In the lanes, alleys, and courts lie filth and débris in
heaps; the houses are ruinous, dirty, and miserable, and in the immediate
vicinity of the river and the valley bottom I found many a one whose
ground-floor, half-buried in the hillside, was totally abandoned. In general,
the portions of the valley bottom in which working-men's cottages have crowded
between the tall factories, are among the worst-built and dirtiest districts of
the whole town. In the newer portions of this, as of every other factory town,
the cottages are more regular, being built in rows, but they share here, too,
all the evils incident to the customary method of providing working-men's
dwellings, evils of which we shall have occasions to speak more particularly in
discussing Manchester. The same is true of the remaining towns of the West
Riding, especially of Barnsley, Halifax, and Huddersfield. The last named, the
handsomest by far of all the factory towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire by
reason of its charming situation and modern architecture, has yet its bad
quarter; for a committee appointed by a meeting of citizens to survey the town
reported August 5th, 1844:

"It is notorious that there are whole streets in the town of
Huddersfield, and many courts and alleys, which are neither flagged, paved,
sewered, nor drained; where garbage and filth of every description are left on
the surface to ferment and rot; where pools of stagnant water are almost
constant, where the dwellings adjoining are thus necessarily caused to be of an
inferior and even filthy description; thus where disease is engendered, and the
health of the whole town perilled."

If we cross Blackstone Edge or penetrate it with the railroad, we enter upon
that classic soil on which English manufacture has achieved its masterwork and
from which all labour movements emanate, namely, South Lancashire with its
central city Manchester. Again we have beautiful hill country, sloping gently
from the watershed westwards towards the Irish Sea, with the charming green
valleys of the Ribble, the Irwell, the Mersey, and their tributaries, a country
which, a hundred years ago chiefly swamp land, thinly populated, is now sown
with towns and villages, and is the most densely populated strip of country in
England. In Lancashire, and especially in Manchester, English manufacture finds
at once its starting-point and its centre. The Manchester Exchange is the
thermometer for all the fluctuations of trade. The modern art of manufacture
has reached its perfection in Manchester. In the cotton industry of South
Lancashire, the application of the forces of Nature, the superseding of
hand-labour by machinery (especially by the power-loom and the self-acting
mule), and the division of labour, are seen at the highest point; and, if we
recognise in these three elements that which is characteristic of modern
manufacture, we must confess that the cotton industry has remained in advance
of all other branches of industry from the beginning down to the present day.
The effects of modern manufacture upon the working-class must necessarily
develop here most freely and perfectly, and the manufacturing proletariat
present itself in its fullest classic perfection. The degradation to which the
application of steam-power, machinery and the division of labour reduce the
working-man, and the attempts of the proletariat to rise above this abasement,
must likewise be carried to the highest point and with the fullest
consciousness. Hence because Manchester is the classic type of a modern
manufacturing town, and because I know it as intimately as my own native town,
more intimately than most of its residents know it, we shall make a longer stay
here.

The towns surrounding Manchester vary little from the central city, so far
as the working-people's quarters are concerned, except that the working-class
forms, if possible, a larger proportion of their population. These towns are
purely industrial and conduct all their business through Manchester upon which
they are in every respect dependent, whence they are inhabited only by
working-men and petty tradesmen, while Manchester has a very considerable
commercial population, especially of commission and "respectable" retail
dealers. Hence Bolton, Preston, Wigan, Bury, Rochdale, Middleton, Heywood,
Oldham, Ashton, Stalybridge, Stockport, etc., though nearly all towns of
thirty, fifty, seventy to ninety thousand inhabitants, are almost wholly
working-people's districts, interspersed only with factories, a few
thoroughfares lined with shops, and a few lanes along which the gardens and
houses of the manufacturers are scattered like villas. The towns themselves are
badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking
of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally bright red brick,
turned black with time, which is here the universal building material. Cellar
dwellings are general here; wherever it is in any way possible, these
subterranean dens are constructed, and a very considerable portion of the
population dwells in them.

Among the worst of these towns after Preston and Oldham is Bolton, eleven
miles north-west of Manchester. It has, so far as I have been able to observe
in my repeated visits, but one main street, a very dirty one, Deansgate, which
serves as a market, and is even in the finest weather a dark, unattractive hole
in spite of the fact that, except for the factories, its sides are formed by
low one and two-storied houses. Here, as everywhere, the older part of the town
is especially ruinous and miserable. A dark-coloured body of water, which
leaves the beholder in doubt whether it is a brook or a long string of stagnant
puddles, flows through the town and contributes its share to the total
pollution of the air, by no means pure without it.

There is Stockport, too, which lies on the Cheshire side of the Mersey, but
belongs nevertheless to the manufacturing district of Manchester. It lies in a
narrow valley along the Mersey, so that the streets slope down a steep hill on
one side and up an equally steep one on the other, while the railway from
Manchester to Birmingham passes over a high viaduct above the city and the
whole valley. Stockport is renowned throughout the entire district as one of
the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks, indeed, especially when viewed from
the viaduct, excessively repellent. But far more repulsive are the cottages and
cellar dwellings of the working-class, which stretch in long rows through all
parts of the town from the valley bottom to the crest of the hill. I do not
remember to have seen so many cellars used as dwellings in any other town of
this district.

A few miles north-east of Stockport is Ashton-under-Lyne, one of the newest
factory towns of this region. It stands on the slope of a hill at the foot of
which are the canal and the river Tame, and is, in general, built on the newer,
more regular plan. Five or six parallel streets stretch along the hill,
intersected at right angles by others leading down into the valley. By this
method, the factories would be excluded from the town proper, even if the
proximity of the river and the canal-way did not draw them all into the valley
where they stand thickly crowded, belching forth black smoke from their
chimneys. To this arrangement Ashton owes a much more attractive appearance
than that of most factory towns; the streets are broader and cleaner, the
cottages look new, bright red, and comfortable. But the modern system of
building cottages for working-men has its own disadvantages; every street has
its concealed back lane to which a narrow paved path leads, and which is all
the dirtier. And, although I saw no buildings, except a few on entering, which
could have been more than fifty years old, there are even in Ashton streets in
which the cottages are getting bad, where the bricks in the house-corners are
no longer firm but shift about, in which the walls have cracks and will not
hold the chalk whitewash inside; streets, whose dirty, smoke-begrimed aspect is
nowise different from that of the other towns of the district, except that in
Ashton this is the exception, not the rule.

A mile eastward lies Stalybridge, also on the Tame. In coming over the hill
from Ashton, the traveller has, at the top, both right and left, fine large
gardens with superb villa-like houses in their midst, built usually in the
Elizabethan style, which is to the Gothic precisely what the Anglican Church is
to the Apostolic Roman Catholic. A hundred paces farther and Stalybridge shows
itself in the valley, in sharp contrast with the beautiful country seats, in
sharp contrast even with the modest cottages of Ashton! Stalybridge lies in a
narrow, crooked ravine, much narrower even than the valley at Stockport, and
both sides of this ravine are occupied by an irregular group of cottages,
houses, and mills. On entering, the very first cottages are narrow,
smoke-begrimed, old and ruinous; and as the first houses, so the whole town. A
few streets lie in the narrow valley bottom, most of them run criss-cross,
pell-mell, up hill and down, and in nearly all the houses, by reason of this
sloping situation, the ground-floor is half-buried in the earth; and what
multitudes of courts, back lanes, and remote nooks arise out of this confused
way of building may be seen from the hills, whence one has the town, here and
there, in a bird's-eye view almost at one's feet. Add to this the shocking
filth, and the repulsive effect of Stalybridge, in spite of its pretty
surroundings, may be readily imagined.

But enough of these little towns. Each has its own peculiarities, but in
general, the working-people live in them just as in Manchester. Hence I have
especially sketched only their peculiar construction, and would observe that
all more general observations as to the condition of the labouring population
in Manchester are fully applicable to these surrounding towns as well.

Manchester lies at the foot of the southern slope of a range of hills, which
stretch hither from Oldham, their last peak, Kersallmoor, being at once the
race course and the Mons Sacer of Manchester. Manchester proper lies on the
left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and the two smaller ones, the Irk
and the Medlock, which here empty into the Irwell. On the right bank of the
Irwell, bounded by a sharp curve of the river, lies Salford, and farther
westward Pendleton; northward from the Irwell lie Upper and Lower Broughton;
northward of the Irk, Cheetham Hill; south of the Medlock lies Hulme; farther
east Chorlton on Medlock; still farther, pretty well to the east of Manchester,
Ardwick. The whole assemblage of buildings is commonly called Manchester, and
contains about four hundred thousand inhabitnts, rather more than less. The
town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and
go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people's quarter
or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business
or to pleasure walks. This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious
tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination, the
working-people's quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city
reserved for the middle- class; or, if this does not succeed, they are
concealed with the cloak of charity. Manchester contains, at its heart, a
rather extended commercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as
broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and warehouses. Nearly the whole
district is abandoned by dwellers, and is lonely and deserted at night; only
watchmen and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns. This
district is cut through by certain main thoroughfares upon which the vast
traffic concentrates, and in which the ground level is lined with brilliant
shops. In these streets the upper floors are occupied, here and there, and
there is a good deal of life upon them until late at night. With the exception
of this commercial district, all Manchester proper, all Salford and Hulme, a
great part of Pendleton and Chorlton, two-thirds of Ardwick, and single
stretches of Cheetham Hill and Broughton are all unmixed working-people's
quarters, stretching like a girdle, averaging a mile and a half in breadth,
around the commercial district. Outside, beyond this girdle, lives the upper
and middle bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie in regularly laid out streets in
the vicinity of the working quarters, especially in Chorlton and the lower
lying portions of Cheetham Hill; the upper bourgeoisie in remoter villas with
gardens in Chorlton and Ardwick, or on the breezy heights of Cheetham Hill,
Broughton, and Pendleton, in free, wholesome country air, in fine, comfortable
homes, passed once every half or quarter hour by omnibuses going into the city.
And the finest part of the arrangement is this, that the members of this money
aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring
districts to their places of business without ever seeing that they are in the
midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the
thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are
lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept
in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, which, out of self-interest,
cares for a decent and cleanly external appearance and can care for it. True,
these shops bear some relation to the districts which lie behind them, and are
more elegant in the commercial and residential quarters than when they hide
grimy working-men's dwellings; but they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the
wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime
which form the complement of their wealth. So, for instance, Deansgate, which
leads from the Old Church directly southward, is lined first with mills and
warehouses, then with second-rate shops and alehouses; farther south, when it
leaves the commercial district, with less inviting shops, which grow dirtier
and more interrupted by beerhouses and gin-palaces the farther one goes, until
at the southern end the appearance of the shops leaves no doubt that workers
and workers only are their customers. So Market Street running south-east from
the Exchange; at first brilliant shops of the best sort, with counting-houses
or warehouses above; in the continuation, Piccadilly, immense hotels and
warehouses; in the farther continuation, London Road, in the neighbourhood of
the Medlock, factories, beerhouses, shops for the humbler bourgeoisie and the
working populations; and from this point onward, large gardens and villas of
the wealthier merchants and manufacturers. In this way any one who knows
Manchester can infer the adjoining districts from the appearance of the
thoroughfare, but one is seldom in a position to catch from the street a
glimpse of the real labouring districts. I know very well that this
hypocritical plan is more or less common to all great cities; I know, too, that
the retail dealers are forced by the nature of their business to take
possession of the great highways; I know that there are more good buildings
than bad ones upon such streets everywhere, and that the value of land is
greater near them than in remoter districts; but at the same time I have never
seen so systematic a shutting out of the working-class from the thoroughfares,
so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the
nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester. And yet, in other respects,
Manchester is less built according to a plan, after officials regulations, is
more an outgrowth of accident than any other city; and when I consider in this
connection the eager assurances of the middle-class, that the working-class is
doing famously, I cannot help feeling that the Liberal manufacturers, the "Big
Wigs" of Manchester, are not so innocent after all, in the matter of this
shameful method of construction.

I may mention just here that the mills almost all adjoin the rivers or the
different canals that ramify throughout the city, before I proceed at once to
describe the labouring quarters. First of all, there is the Old Town of
Manchester, which lies between the northern boundary of the commercial district
and the Irk. Here the streets, even the better ones, are narrow and winding, as
Todd Street, Long Millgate, Withy Grove, and Shude Hill, the
houses dirty,
old, and tumble-down, and the construction of the side streets utterly
horrible. Going from the Old Church to Long Millgate, the stroller has at once
a row of old-fashioned houses at the right, of which not one has kept its
original level; these are remnants of the old pre-manufacturing Manchester,
whose former inhabitants have removed with their descendants into better-built
districts, and have left the houses, which were not good enough for them, to a
population strongly mixed with Irish blood. Here one is in an almost
undisguised working-men's quarter, for even the shops and beerhouses hardly
take the trouble to exhibit a trifling degree of cleanliness. But all this is
nothing in comparison with the courts and lanes which lie behind, to which
access can be gained only through covered passages, in which no two human
beings can pass at the same time. Of the irregular cramming together of
dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan, of the tangle in which they are
crowded literally one upon the other, it is impossible to convey an idea. And
it is not the buildings surviving from the old times of Manchester which are to
blame for this; the confusion has only recently reached its height when every
scrap of space left by the old way of building has been filled up and patched
over until not a foot of land is left to be further occupied.

To confirm my statement I have drawn here a small section of the plan of
Manchester – not the worst spot and not one-tenth of the whole Old Town.

This drawing will suffice to characterise the irrational manner in which the
entire district was built, particularly the part near the Irk.

The south bank of the Irk is here very steep and between fifteen and thirty
feet high. On this declivitous hillside there are planted three rows of houses,
of which the lowest rise directly out of the river, while the front walls of
the highest stand on the crest of the hill in Long Millgate. Among them are
mills on the river, in short, the method of construction is as crowded and
disorderly here as in the lower part of Long Millgate. Right and left a
multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts,
and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal
of which is not to be found – especially in the courts which lead down to
the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I
have yet beheld. In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance,
at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the
inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul
pools of stagnant urine and excrement. This is the first court on the Irk above
Ducie Bridge – in case any one should care to look into it. Below it on the
river there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighbourhood with the
stench of animal putrefaction. Below Ducie Bridge the only entrance to most of
the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and
filth. The first court below Ducie Bridge, known as Allen's Court, was in such
a state at the time of the cholera that the sanitary police ordered it
evacuated, swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime. Dr. Kay gives a
terrible description of the state of this court at that time. [10]
class>Since then, it seems to have been
partially torn away and rebuilt; at least looking down from Ducie Bridge, the
passer-by sees several ruined walls and heaps of debris with some newer houses.
The view from this bridge, mercifully concealed from mortals of small stature
by a parapet as high as a man, is characteristic for the whole district. At the
bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling
stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on . the shallower right
bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green,
slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of
miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the
bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. But besides this,
the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime
and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. Above the bridge are tanneries,
bonemills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into
the Irk, which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and
privies. It may be easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream
deposits. Below the bridge you look upon the piles of débris, the
refuse, filth, and offal from the courts on the steep left bank; here each
house is packed close behind its neighbour and a piece of each is visible, all
black, smoky, crumbling, ancient, with broken panes and window-frames. The
background is furnished by old barrack-like factory buildings. On the lower
right bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house being a ruin
without a roof, piled with débris; the third stands so low that the
lowest floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or doors. Here the
background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and
Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the "Poor-Law Bastille"
of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its
high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people'a quarter
below.

Above Ducie Bridge, the left bank grows more flat and the right bank
steeper, but the condition of the dwellings on both bank grows worse rather
than better. He who turns to the left here from the main street, Long Millgate,
is lost; he wanders from one court to another, turns countless corners, passes
nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and alleys, until after a few minutes he has
lost all clue, and knows not whither to turn. Everywhere half or wholly ruined
buildings, some of them actually uninhabited, which means a great deal here;
rarely a wooden or stone floor to be seen in the houses, almost uniformly
broken, ill-fitting windows and doors, and a state of filth! Everywhere heaps
of débris, refuse, and offal; standing pools for gutters, and a stench
which alone would make it impossible for a human being in any degree civilised
to live in such a district. The newly built extension of the Leeds railway,
which crosses the Irk here, has swept away some of these courts and lanes,
laying others completely open to view. Immediately under the railway bridge
there stands a court, the filth and horrors of which surpass all the others by
far, just because it was hitherto so shut off, so secluded that the way to it
could not be found without a good deal of trouble, I should never have
discovered it myself, without the breaks made by the railway, though I thought
I knew this whole region thoroughly. Passing along a rough bank, among stakes
and washing-lines, one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied,
one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living
and sleeping-room all in one. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six
broad, I found two beds – and such bedsteads and beds! – which, with a
staircase and chimney-place, exactly filled the room. In several others I found
absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the inhabitants leaned
against it. Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of
pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with
the feet. This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded
on two sides by houses and a factory, and on the third by the river, and
besides the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow doorway alone led out into
another almost equally ill-built, ill-kept labyrinth of dwellings.

Enough! The whole side of the Irk is built in this way, a planless, knotted
chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean
interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings. And how
could the people be clean with no proper opportunity for satisfying the most
natural and ordinary wants? Privies are so rare here that they are either
filled up every day, or are too remote for most of the inhabitants to use. How
can people wash when they have only the dirty Irk water at hand, while pumps
and water pipes can be found in decent parts of the city alone? In truth, it
cannot be charged to the account of these helots of modern society if their
dwellings are not more cleanly than the pig-sties which are here and there to
be seen among them. The landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings like the six
or seven cellars on the quay directly below Scotland Bridge, the floors of
which stand at least two feet below the low-water level of the Irk that flows
not six feet away from them; or like the upper floor of the corner-house on the
opposite shore directly above the bridge, where the ground-floor, utterly
uninhabitable, stands deprived of all fittings for doors and windows, a case by
no means rare in this region, when this open ground-floor is used as a privy by
the whole neighbourhood for want of other facilities!

If we leave the Irk and penetrate once more on the opposite side from Long
Millgate into the midst of the working-men's dwellings, we shall come into a
somewhat newer quarter, which stretches from St. Michael's Church to Withy
Grove and Shude Hill. Here there is somewhat better order. In place of the
chaos of buildings, we find at least long straight lanes and alleys or courts,
built according to a plan and usually square. But if, in the former case, every
house was built according to caprice, here each lane and court is so built,
without reference to the situation of the adjoining ones. The lanes run now in
this direction, now in that, while every two minutes the wanderer gets into a
blind alley, or, on turning a corner, finds himself back where he started from;
certainly no one who has not lived a considerable time in this labyrinth can
find his way through it.

If I may use the word at all in speaking of this district, the ventilation
of these streets and courts is, in consequence of this confusion, quite as
imperfect as in the Irk region; and if this quarter may, nevertheless, be said
to have some advantage over that of the Irk, the houses being newer and the
streets occasionally having gutters, nearly every house has, on the other hand,
a cellar dwelling, which is rarely found in the Irk district, by reason of the
greater age and more careless construction of the houses. As for the rest, the
filth, débris, and offal heaps, and the pools in the streets are
common to both quarters, and in the district now under discussion, another
feature most injurious to the cleanliness of the inhabitants, is the multitude
of pigs walking about in all the alleys, rooting into the offal heaps, or kept
imprisoned in small pens. Here, as in most of the working-men's quarters of
Manchester, the pork-raisers rent the courts and build pig-pens in them. In
almost every court one or even several such pens may be found, into which the
inhabitants of the court throw all refuse and offal, whence the swine grow fat;
and the atmosphere, confined on all four sides, is utterly corrupted by
putrefying animal and vegetable substances. Through this quarter, a broad and
measurably decent street has been cut, Millers Street, and the background has
been pretty successfully concealed. But if any one should be led by curiosity
to pass through one of the numerous passages which lead into the courts, he
will find this piggery repeated at every twenty paces.

Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am
forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough
to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the
defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which
characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least
twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart
of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If
any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little
air – and such air! – he can breathe, how little of civilisation he
may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is
the Old Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever
any one mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but
what does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is
of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. The couple of
hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long since abandoned
by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone has crammed into them
the swarms of workers whom they now shelter; the industrial epoch alone has
built up every spot between these old houses to win a covering for the masses
whom it has conjured hither from the agricultural districts and from Ireland;
the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of these cattlesheds to rent them
for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to
undermine the health of thousands, in order that they alone, the
owners, may grow rich. In the industrial epoch alone has it become possible
that the worker scarcely freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere
material, a mere chattel; that he must let himself be crowded into a dwelling
too bad for every other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys the right to
let go utterly to ruin. This manufacture has achieved, which, without these
workers, this poverty, this slavery could not have lived. True, the original
construction of this quarter was bad, little good could have been made out of
it; but, have the landowners, has the municipality done anything to improve it
when rebuilding? On the contrary, wherever a nook or corner was free, a house
has been run up; where a superfluous passage remained, it has been built up;
the value of land rose with the blossoming out of manufacture, and the more it
rose, the more madly was the work of building up carried on, without reference
to the health or comfort of the inhabitants, with sole reference to the highest
possible profit on the principle that no hole is so bad but that some poor
creature must take it who can pay for nothing better. However, it is the
Old Town, and with this reflection the bourgeoisie is comforted. Let us see,
therefore, how much better it is in the New Town.

The New Town, known also as Irish Town, stretches up a hill of
clay, beyond the Old Town, between the Irk and St. George's Road. Here all the
features of a city are lost. Single rows of houses or groups of streets stand,
here and there, like little villages on the naked, not even grass-grown clay
soil; the houses, or rather cottages, are in bad order, never repaired, filthy,
with damp, unclean, cellar dwellings; the lanes are neither paved nor supplied
with sewers, but harbour numerous colonies of swine penned in small sties or
yards, or wandering unrestrained through the neighbourhood. The mud in the
streets is so deep that there is never a chance, except in the dryest weather,
of walking without sinking into it ankle deep at every step. In the vicinity of
St. George's Road, the separate groups of buildings approach each other more
closely, ending in a continuation of lanes, blind alleys, back lanes and
courts, which grow more and more crowded and irregular the nearer they approach
the heart of the town. True, they are here oftener paved or supplied with paved
sidewalks and gutters; but the filth, the bad order of the houses, and
especially of the cellars, remain the same.

It may not be out of place to make some general observations just here as to
the customary construction of working-men's quarters in Manchester. We have
seen how in the Old Town pure accident determined the grouping of the houses in
general. Every house is built without reference to any other, and the scraps of
space between them are called courts for want of another
name. In
the somewhat newer portions of the same quarter, and in other working-men's
quarters, dating from the early days of industrial activity, a somewhat more
orderly arrangement may be found. The space between two streets is divided into
more regular, usually square courts.

These courts were built in this way from the beginning, and communicate with
the streets by means of covered passages. If the totally planless construction
is injurious to the health of the workers by preventing ventilation, this
method of shutting them up in courts surrounded on all sides by buildings is
far more so. The air simply cannot escape; the chimneys of the houses are the
sole drains for the imprisoned atmosphere of the courts, and they serve the
purpose only so long as fire is kept burning. [11]Moreover, the houses
surrounding such courts are usually built back to back, having the rear wall in
common; and this alone suffices to prevent any sufficient through ventilation.
And, as the police charged with care of the streets does not trouble itself
about the condition of these courts, as everything quietly lies where it is
thrown, there is no cause for wonder at the filth and heaps of ashes and offal
to be found here. I have been in courts, in Millers Street, at least half a
foot below the level of the thoroughfare, and without the slightest drainage
for the water that accumulates in them in rainy weather!

More recently another different method of building was adopted, and has now
become general. Working-men's cottages are almost never built singly, but
always by the dozen or score; a single contractor building up one or two
streets at a time. These are then arranged as follows: One front is formed of
cottages of the best class, so fortunate as to possess a back door and small
court, and these command the highest rent. In the rear of these cottages runs a
narrow alley, the back street, built up at both ends, into which either a
narrow roadway or a covered passage leads from one side. The cottages which
face this back street command least rent, and are most neglected. These have
their rear walls in common with the third row of cottages, which face a second
street and command less rent than the first row and more than the second. The
streets are laid out somewhat in the following
manner:

By this method of construction, comparatively good ventilation can be
obtained for the first row of cottages, and the third row is no worse off than
in the former method. The middle row, on the other hand, is at least as badly
ventilated as the houses in the courts, and the back street is always in the
same filthy, disgusting condition as they. The contractors prefer this method
because it saves them space, and furnishes the means of fleecing better-paid
workers through the higher rents of the cottages in the first and third rows.

These three different forms of cottage building are found all over
Manchester and throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire, often mixed up together,
but usually separate enough to indicate the relative age of parts of towns. The
third system, that of the back alleys, prevails largely in the great
working-men's district east of St. George's Road and Ancoats Street, and is the
one most often found in the other working-men's quarters of Manchester and its
suburbs.

In the last-mentioned broad district included under the name Ancoats, stand
the largest mills of Manchester lining the canals, colossal six and
seven-storied buildings towering with their slender chimneys far above the low
cottages of the workers. The population of the district consists, therefore,
chiefly of mill-hands, and in the worst streets, of hand-weavers. The streets
nearest the heart of the town are the oldest, and consequently the worst; they
are, however, paved, and supplied with drains. Among them I include those
nearest to and parallel with Oldham Road and Great Ancoats Street. Farther to
the north-east lie many newly built-up streets; here the cottages look neat and
cleanly, doors and windows are new and freshly painted, the rooms within newly
whitewashed; the streets themselves are better aired, the vacant building lots
between them larger and more numerous. But this can be said of a minority of
the houses only, while cellar dwellings are to be found under almost every
cottage; many streets are unpaved and without sewers; and, worse than all, this
neat appearance is all pretence, a pretence which vanishes within the first ten
years. For the construction of the cottages individually is no less to be
condemned than the plan of the streets. All such cottages look neat and
substantial at first; their massive brick walls deceive the eye, and, on
passing through a newly built working- men's street, without remembering the
back alleys and the construction of the houses themselves, one is inclined to
agree with the assertion of the Liberal manufacturers that the working
population is nowhere so well housed as in England. But on closer examination,
it becomes evident that the walls of these cottages are as thin as it is
possible to make them. The outer walls, those of the cellar, which bear the
weight of the ground-floor and roof, are one whole brick thick at most, the
bricks lying with their long sides
touching ;
but I have seen many a cottage of the same height, some in process of building,
whose outer walls were but one-half brick thick, the bricks lying not sidewise
but lengthwise, their narrow ends
touching .
The object of this is to spare material, but there is also another reason for
it; namely, the fact that the contractors never own the land but lease it,
according to the English custom, for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or
ninety-nine years, at the expiration of which time it falls, with everything
upon it, back into the possession of the original holder, who pays nothing in
return for improvements upon it. The improvements are therefore so calculated
by the lessee as to be worth as little as possible at the expiration of the
stipulated term. And as such cottages are often built but twenty or thirty
years before the expiration of the term, it may easily be imagined that the
contractors make no unnecessary expenditures upon them. Moreover, these
contractors, usually carpenters and builders, or manufacturers, spend little or
nothing in repairs, partly to avoid diminishing their rent receipts, and partly
in view of the approaching surrender of the improvement to the landowner; while
in consequence of commercial crises and the loss of work that follows them,
whole streets often stand empty, the cottages falling rapidly into ruin and
uninhabitableness. It is calculated in general that working-men's cottages last
only forty years on the average. This sounds strangely enough when one sees the
beautiful, massive walls of newly built ones, which seem to give promise of
lasting a couple of centuries; but the fact remains that the niggardliness of
the original expenditure, the neglect of all repairs, the frequent periods of
emptiness, the constant change of inhabitants, and the destruction carried on
by the dwellers during the final ten years, usually Irish families, who do not
hesitate to use the wooden portions for firewood – all this, taken together,
accomplishes the complete ruin of the cottages by the end of forty years. Hence
it comes that Ancoats, built chiefly since the sudden growth of manufacture,
chiefly indeed within the present century, contains a vast number of ruinous
houses, most of them being, in fact, in the last stages of inhabitableness. I
will not dwell upon the amount of capital thus wasted, the small additional
expenditure upon the original improvement and upon repairs which would suffice
to keep this whole district clean, decent, and inhabitable for years together.
I have to deal here with the state of the houses and their inhabitants, and it
must be admitted that no more injurious and demoralising method of housing the
workers has yet been discovered than precisely this. The working-man is
constrained to occupy such ruinous dwellings because he cannot pay for others,
and because there are no others in the vicinity of his mill; perhaps, too,
because they belong to the employer, who engages him only on condition of his
taking such a cottage. The calculation with reference to the forty years'
duration of the cottage is, of course, not always perfectly strict; for, if the
dwellings are in a thickly built-up portion of the town, and there is a good
prospect of finding steady occupants for them, while the ground-rent is high,
the contractors do a little something to keep the cottages inhabitable after
the expiration of the forty years. They never do anything more, however, than
is absolutely unavoidable, and the dwellings so repaired are the worst of all.
Occasionally when an epidemic threatens, the otherwise sleepy conscience of the
sanitary police is a little stirred, raids are made into the working-men's
districts, whole rows of cellars and cottages are closed, as happened in the
case of several lanes near Oldham Road; but this does not last long: the
condemned cottages soon find occupants again, the owners are much better off by
letting them, and the sanitary police won't come again so soon. These east and
north-east sides of Manchester are the only ones on which the bourgeoisie has
not built, because ten or eleven months of the year the west and south-west
wind drives the smoke of all the factories hither, and that the working-people
alone may breathe.

Southward from Great Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, working-men's
quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached, irregularly
built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty building lots, uneven,
clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet weather. The cottages are
all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to mind. The stretch cut through by
the Birmingham railway is the most thickly built-up and the worst. Here flows
the Medlock with countless windings through a valley, which is, in places, on a
level with the valley of the Irk. Along both sides of the stream, which is
coal-black, stagnant and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and
working-men's dwellings, the latter all in the worst condition. The bank is
chiefly declivitous and is built over to the water's edge, just as we saw along
the Irk; while the houses are equally bad, whether built on the Manchester side
or in Ardwick, Chorlton, or Hulme. But the most horrible spot (if I should
describe all the separate spots in detail I should never come to the end) lies
on the Manchester side, immediately south-west of Oxford Road, and is known as
Little Ireland. In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded
on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with
buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back
to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish.
The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven,
fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse,
offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the
atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by
the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and
children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage
heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful
and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the
Irk. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows,
mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten doorposts, or in dark, wet
cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if
with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of
humanity. This is the impression and the line of thought which the exterior of
this district forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he hears
that in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps
a cellar, on the average twenty human beings live; that in the whole region,
for each one hundred and twenty persons, one usually inaccessible privy is
provided; and that in spite of all the preachings of the physicians, in spite
of the excitement into which the cholera epidemic plunged the sanitary police
by reason of the condition of Little Ireland, in spite of everything, in this
year of grace 1844, it is in almost the same state as in 1831! Dr. Kay asserts
that not only the cellars but the first floors of all the houses in this
district are damp; that a number of cellars once filled up with earth have now
been emptied and are occupied once more by Irish people; that in one cellar the
water constantly wells up through a hole stopped with clay, the cellar lying
below the river level, so that its occupant, a hand-loom weaver, had to bale
out the water from his dwelling every morning and pour it into the street!

Farther down, on the left side of the Medlock, lies Hulme, which properly
speaking, is one great working-people's district, the condition of which
coincides almost exactly with that of Ancoats; the more thickly built-up
regions chiefly bad and approaching ruin, the less populous of more modern
structure, but generally sunk in filth. On the other side of the Medlock, in
Manchester proper, lies a second great working-men's district which stretches
on both sides of Deansgate as far as the business quarter, and in certain parts
rivals the Old Town. Especially in the immediate vicinity of the business
quarter, between Bridge and Quay Streets, Princess and Peter Streets, the
crowded construction exceeds in places the narrowest courts of the Old Town.
Here are long narrow lanes between which run contracted, crooked courts and
passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught
in a blind alley at every few steps, or comes out where he least expects to,
unless he knows every court and every alley exactly and separately. According
to Dr. Kay, the most demoralised class of all Manchester lived in these ruinous
and filthy districts, people whose occupations are thieving and prostitution
and, to all appearances, his assertion is still true at the present moment.
When the sanitary police made its expedition hither in 1831, it found the
uncleanness as great as in Little Ireland or along the Irk (that it is not much
better today, I can testify); and among other items, they found in Parliament
Street for three hundred and eighty persons, and in Parliament Passage for
thirty thickly populated houses, but a single privy.

If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find on a peninsula formed by the
river a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, which, properly speaking, is one
large working-men's quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue. Salford, once
more important than Manchester, was then the leading town of the surrounding
district to which it still gives its name, Salford Hundred. Hence it is that an
old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty, and ruinous locality is to be found
here, lying opposite the Old Church of Manchester, and in as bad a condition as
the Old Town on the other side of the Irwell. Farther away from the river lies
the newer portion, which is, however, already beyond the limit of its forty
years of cottage life, and therefore ruinous enough. All Salford is built in
courts or narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest I have
ever seen, the little lanes of Genoa. The average construction of Salford is in
this respect much worse than that of Manchester, and so, too, in respect to
cleanliness. If, in Manchester, the police, from time to time, every six or ten
years, makes a raid upon the working-people's districts, closes the worst
dwellings, and causes the filthiest spots in these Augean stables to be
cleansed, in Salford it seems to have done absolutely nothing. The narrow side
lanes and courts of Chapel Street, Greengate, and Gravel Lane have certainly
never been cleansed since they were built. Of late, the Liverpool railway has
been carried through the middle of them, over a high viaduct, and has abolished
many of the filthiest nooks; but what does that avail? Whoever passes over this
viaduct and looks down, sees filth and wretchedness enough; and, if any one
takes the trouble to pass through these lanes and glance through the open doors
and windows into the houses and cellars, he can convince himself afresh with
every step that the workers of Salford live in dwellings in which cleanliness
and comfort are impossible. Exactly the same state of affairs is found in the
more distant regions of Salford, in Islington, along Regent Road, and back of
the Bolton railway. The working-men's dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross
Lane, where a mass of courts and alleys are to be found in the worst possible
state, vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding. In
this district I found a man, apparently about sixty years old, living in a
cow-stable. He had constructed a sort of chimney for his square pen, which had
neither windows, floor, nor ceiling, had obtained a bedstead and lived there,
though the rain dripped through his rotten roof. This man was too old and weak
for regular work, and supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart;
the dung-heaps lay next door to his palace!

Such are the various working-people's quarters of Manchester as I had
occasion to observe them personally during twenty months. If we briefly
formulate the result of our wanderings, we must admit that 350,000
working-people of Manchester and its environs live, almost all of them, in
wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which surround them are
usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the
slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit secured
by the contractor. In a word, we must confess that in the working-men's
dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no
comfortable family life is possible; that in such dwellings only a physically
degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and
physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home. And I am not
alone in making this assertion. We have seen that Dr. Kay gives precisely the
same description; and, though it is superfluous, I quote further the words of a
Liberal, recognised and highly valued as an authority by the manufacturers, and
a fanatical opponent of all independent movements of the workers: [12]

"But when I went through their [i.e., the Manchester
operatives'] habitations in Irish Town, and Ancoats, and Little Ireland, my
only wonder was that tolerable health could be maintained by the inmates of
such houses. These towns, for such they are in extent and population, have been
erected by small speculators with an utter disregard to everything except
immediate profit. A carpenter and a bricklayer club to buy a patch of ground
[i.e., they lease it for a number of years], and cover it with what they call
houses. In one place we saw a whole street following the course of a ditch, in
order to have deeper cellars (cellars for people, not for lumber) without the
expense of excavations. Not a house in this street escaped cholera. And
generally speaking, throughout these suburbs the streets are unpaved, with a
dung-hill or a pond in the middle; the houses built back to back, without
ventilation or drainage; and whole families occupy a corner of a cellar or of a
garret."

I have already referred to the unusual activity which the sanitary police
manifested during the cholera visitation. When the epidemic was approaching, a
universal terror seized the bourgeoisie of the city. People remembered the
unwholesome dwellings of the poor, and trembled before the certainty that each
of these slums would become a centre for the plague, whence it would spread
desolation in all directions through the houses of the propertied class. A
Health Commission was appointed at once to investigate these districts, and
report upon their condition to the Town Council. Dr. Kay, himself a member of
this Commission, who visited in person every separate police district except
one, the eleventh, quotes extracts from their reports: There were inspected, in
all, 6,951 houses – naturally in Manchester proper alone, Salford and the
other suburbs being excluded. Of these, 2,565 urgently needed whitewashing
within; 960 were out of repair, 959 had insufficient drains; 1,455 were damp;
452 were badly ventilated; 2,221 were without privies. Of the 687 streets
inspected, 248 were unpaved, 53 but partially paved, 112 ill- ventilated, 352
containing standing pools, heaps of debris, refuse, etc. To cleanse such an
Augean stable before the arrival of the cholera was, of course, out of the
question. A few of the worst nooks were therefore cleansed, and everything else
left as before..In the cleansed spots, as Little Ireland proves, the old filthy
condition was naturally restored in a couple of months. As to the internal
condition of these houses, the same Commission reports a state of things
similar to that which we have already met with in London, Edinburgh, and other
cities.

"A whole Irish family is often accommodated on a single bed,
and sometimes a heap of filthy straw and a covering of old sacking hide them in
one undistinguished heap, debased alike by penury, want of economy and
dissolute habits. Frequently the inspectors found two families crowded into one
small house, containing only two apartments, one in which they slept, and
another in which they eat; and often more than one family lived in a damp
cellar, containing only one room, in whose pestilential atmosphere from twelve
to sixteen persons were crowded. To these fertile sources of disease were
sometimes added the keeping of the pigs and other animals in the house, with
other nuisances of the most revolting character."

We must add that many families, who had but one room for themselves, receive
boarders and lodgers in it, that such lodgers of both sexes by no means rarely
sleep in the same bed with the married couple; and that the single case of a
man and his wife and his adult sister-in-law sleeping in one bed was found,
according to the "Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring
Population", six times repeated in Manchester. Common lodging-houses, too, are
very numerous; Dr. Kay gives their number in 1831 as 267 in Manchester proper,
and they must have increased greatly since then. Each of these receives from
twenty to thirty guests, so that they shelter all told, nightly, from five to
seven thousand human beings. The character of the houses and their guests is
the same as in other cities. Five to seven beds in each room lie on the floor
– without bedsteads, and on these sleep, mixed indiscriminately, as many
persons as apply. What physical and moral atmosphere reigns in these holes I
need not state. Each of these houses is a focus of crime, the scene of deeds
against which human nature revolts, which would perhaps never have been
executed but for this forced centralisation of vice. Gaskell [13]
class>gives the number of persons living in
cellars in Manchester proper as 20,000. The Weekly Dispatch gives the
number, "according to official reports", as twelve per cent of the
working-class, which agrees with Gaskell's number; the workers being estimated
at 175,000, 21,000 would form twelve per cent of it. The cellar dwellings in
the suburbs are at least as numerous. so that the number of persons living in
cellars in Manchester – using its name in the broader sense – is not less
than forty to fifty thousand. So much for the dwellings of the workers in the
largest cities and towns. The manner in which the need of a shelter is
satisfied furnishes a standard for the manner in which all other necessities
are supplied. That in these filthy holes a ragged, ill-fed population alone can
dwell is a safe conclusion, and such is the fact. The clothing of the
working-people, in the majority of cases, is in a very bad condition. The
material used for it is not of the best adapted. Wool and linen have almost
vanished from the wardrobe of both sexes, and cotton has taken their place.
Shirts are made of bleached or coloured cotton goods; the dresses of the women
are chiefly of cotton print goods, and woollen petticoats are rarely to be seen
on the washline. The men wear chiefly trousers of fustian or other heavy cotton
goods, and jackets or coats of the same. Fustian has become the proverbial
costume of the working-men, who are called "fustian jackets", and call
themselves so in contrast to the gentlemen who wear broadcloth, which latter
words are used as characteristic for the middle-class. When Feargus O'Connor,
the Chartist leader, came to Manchester during the insurrection of 1842, he
appeared, amidst the deafening applause of the working-men, in a fustian suit
of clothing. Hats are the universal head-covering in England, even for
working-men, hats of the most diverse forms, round, high, broad-brimmed,
narrow- brimmed, or without brims – only the younger men in factory towns
wearing caps. Any one who does not own a hat folds himself a low, square paper
cap.

The whole clothing of the working-class, even assuming it to be in good
condition, is little adapted to the climate. The damp air of England, with its
sudden changes of temperature, more calculated than any other to give rise to
colds, obliges almost the whole middle-class to wear flannel next to the skin,
about the body, and flannel scarfs and shirts are in almost universal use. Not
only is the working-class deprived of this precaution, it is scarcely ever in a
position to use a thread of woollen clothing; and the heavy cotton goods,
though thicker, stiffer, and heavier than woollen clothes, afford much less
protection against cold and wet, remain damp much longer because of their
thickness and the nature of the stuff, and have nothing of the compact density
of fulled woollen cloths. And, if a working-man once buys himself a woollen
coat for Sunday, he must get it from one of the "cheap shops" where he finds
bad, so-called "Devil's-dust" cloth, manufactured for sale and not for use, and
liable to tear or grow threadbare in a fortnight, or he must buy of an old
clothes'-dealer a half-worn coat which has seen its best days, and lasts but a
few weeks. Moreover, the working-man's clothing is, in most cases, in bad
condition, and there is the oft-recurring necessity for placing the best pieces
in the pawnbroker's shop. But among very large numbers, especially among the
Irish, the prevailing clothing consists of perfect rags often beyond all
mending, or so patched that the original colour can no longer be detected. Yet
the English and Anglo-Irish go on patching, and have carried this art to a
remarkable pitch, putting wool or bagging on fustian, or the reverse – it's
all the same to them. But the true, transplanted Irish hardly ever patch except
in the extremest necessity, when the garment would otherwise fall apart.
Ordinarily the rags of the shirt protrude through the rents in the coat or
trousers. They wear, as Thomas Carlyle says, [14]

"a suit of tatters, the getting on or off which is said to
be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of
the calendar."

The Irish have introduced, too, the custom, previously unknown in England,
of going barefoot. In every manufacturing town there is now to be seen a
multitude of people, especially women and children, going about barefoot, and
their example is gradually being adopted by the poorer English.

As with clothing, so with food. The workers get what is too bad for the
property-holding class. In the great towns of England everything may be had of
the best, but it costs money; and the workman, who must keep house on a couple
of pence, cannot afford much expense. Moreover, he usually receives his wages
on Saturday evening, for, although a beginning has been made in the payment of
wages on Friday, this excellent arrangement is by no means universal; and so he
comes to market at five or even seven o'clock, while the buyers of the
middle-class have had the first choice during the morning, when the market
teems with the best of everything. But when the workers reach it, the best has
vanished, and, if it was still there, they would probably not be able to buy
it. The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted,
the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough,
taken from old, often diseased, cattle, or such as have died a natural death,
and not fresh even then, often half decayed. The sellers are usually small
hucksters who buy up inferior goods, and can sell them cheaply by reason of
their badness. The poorest workers are forced to use still another device to
get together the things they need with their few pence. As nothing can be sold
on Sunday, and all shops must be closed at twelve o'clock on Saturday night,
such things as would not keep until Monday are sold at any price between ten
o'clock and midnight. But nine-tenths of what is sold at ten o'clock is past
using by Sunday morning, yet these are precisely the provisions which make up
the Sunday dinner of the poorest class. The meat which the workers buy is very
often past using; but having bought it, they must eat it. On the 6th of
January, 1844 (if I am not greatly mistaken), a court leet was held in
Manchester, when eleven meat-sellers were fined for having sold tainted meat.
Each of them had a whole ox or pig, or several sheep, or from fifty to sixty
pounds of meat, which were all confiscated in a tainted condition. In one case,
fifty-four stuffed Christmas geese were seized which had proved unsaleable in
Liverpool, and had been forwarded to Manchester, where they were brought to
market foul and rotten. All the particulars, with names and fines, were
published at the time in the Manchester Guardian. In the six weeks,
from July 1st to August 14th [1844], the same sheet reported three similar
cases. According to the Guardian for July 3rd, a pig, weighing 200
pounds, which had been found dead and decayed, was cut up and exposed for sale
by a butcher at Heywood, and was then seized. According to the number for July
31st, two butchers at Wigan, of whom one had previously been convicted of the
same offence, were fined £2 and £4 respectively, for exposing tainted meat for
sale; and, according to the number for August 10th, twenty-six tainted hams
seized at a dealer's in Bolton, were publicly burnt, and the dealer fined
twenty shillings. But these are by no means all the cases; they do not even
form a fair average for a period of six weeks, according to which to form an
average for the year. There are often seasons in which every number of the
semi-weekly Guardian mentions a similar case found in Manchester or
its vicinity. And when one reflects upon the many cases which must escape
detection in the extensive markets that stretch along the front of every main
street, under the slender supervision of the market inspectors – and how else
can one explain the boldness with which whole animals are exposed for sale? –
when one considers how great the temptation must be, in view of the
incomprehensibly small fines mentioned in the foregoing cases; when one
reflects what condition a piece of meat must have reached to be seized by the
inspectors, it is impossible to believe that the workers obtain good and
nourishing meat as a usual thing. But they are victimised in yet another way by
the money-greed of the middle-class. Dealers and manufacturers adulterate all
kinds of provisions in an atrocious manner, and without the slightest regard to
the health of the consumers. We have heard the Manchester Guardian
upon this subject, let us hear another organ of the middle-class – I delight
in the testimony of my opponents – let us hear the Liverpool Mercury:

"Salt butter is moulded into the form of pounds of fresh
butter, and cased over with fresh. In other instances a pound of fresh is
conspicuously placed to be tasted; but that pound is not sold; and in other
instances salt butter, washed, is moulded and sold as fresh.... Pounded rice
and other cheap materials are mixed in sugar, and sold at full monopoly price.
A chemical substance – the refuse of the soap manufactories – is also mixed
with other substances and sold as sugar.... Chicory is mixed in good coffee.
Chicory, or some similarly cheap substance, is skilfully moulded into the form
of the coffee berry, and is mixed with the bulk very liberally.... Cocoa is
extensively adulterated with fine brown earth, wrought up with mutton fat, so
as to amalgamate with portions of the real article.... The leaves of tea are
mingled with sloe levies and other abominations. Used leaves are also re-dried,
and re-coloured on hot copper plates, and sold as tea. Pepper is adulterated
with dust from husks etc.; port wine is altogether manufactured (from spirits,
dyes, etc.), it being notorious that more port wine is drunk in this country
than is made in Portugal. Nasty things of all sorts are mixed with the weed
tobacco in all its manufactured forms".

I can add that several of the most respected tobacco dealers in Manchester
announced publicly last summer, that, by reason of the universal adulteration
of tobacco, no firm could carry on business without adulteration, and that no
cigar costing less than three pence is made wholly from tobacco. These frauds
are naturally not restricted to articles of food, though I could mention a
dozen more, the villainy of mixing gypsum or chalk with flour among them. Fraud
is practised in the sale of articles of every sort: flannel, stockings, etc.,
are stretched, and shrink after the first washing; narrow cloth is sold as
being from one and a half to three inches broader than it actually is;
stoneware is so thinly glazed that the glazing is good for nothing and cracks
at once, and a hundred other rascalities, tout comme chez nous. But
the lion's share of the evil results of these frauds falls to the workers. The
rich are less deceived, because they can pay the high prices of the large shops
which have a reputation to lose, and would injure themselves more than their
customers if they kept poor or adulterated wares; the rich are spoiled, too, by
habitual good eating, and detect adulteration more easily with their sensitive
palates. But the poor, the working-people, to whom a couple of farthings are
important, who must buy many things with little money, who cannot afford to
inquire too closely into the quality of their purchases, and cannot do so in
any case because they have had no opportunity of cultivating their taste – to
their share fall all the adulterated, poisoned provisions. They must deal with
the small retailers, must buy perhaps on credit, and.these small retail dealers
who cannot sell even the same quality of goods so cheaply as the largest
retailers, because of their small capital and the large proportional expenses
of their business, must knowingly or unknowingly buy adulterated goods in order
to sell at the lower prices required, and to meet the competition of the
others. Further, a large retail dealer who has extensive capital invested in
his business is ruined with his ruined credit if detected in a fraudulent
practice; but what harm does it do a small grocer, who has customers in a
single street only, if frauds are proved against him? If no one trusts him in
Ancoats, he moves to Chorlton or Hulme, where no one knows him, and where he
continues to defraud as before; while legal penalties attach to very few
adulterations unless they involve revenue frauds. Not in the quality alone, but
in the quantity of his goods as well, is the English working-man defrauded. The
small dealers usually have false weights and measures, and an incredible number
of convictions for such offences may be read in the police reports. How
universal this form of fraud is in the manufacturing districts, a couple of
extracts from the Manchester Guardian may serve to show. They cover only a
short period, and, even here, I have not all the numbers at hand:

Guardian, June 15, 1844, Rochdale Sessions.– Four
dealers fined five to ten shillings for using light weights. Stockport
Sessions.– Two dealers fined one shilling, one of them having seven light
weights and a false scale, and both having been warned. Guardian, June 19, Rochdale Sessions.– One dealer fined five, and two
farmers ten shillings. Guardian, June 22, Manchester Justices of the Peace.– Nineteen
dealers fined two shillings and sixpence to two pounds. Guardian, June 26, Ashton Sessions.– Fourteen dealers and farmers
fined two shillings and sixpence to one pound. Hyde Petty Sessions.– Nine
farmers and dealers condemned to pay costs and five shillings fines. Guardian, July 6, Manchester.– Sixteen dealers condemned to pay costs
and fines not exceeding ten shillings. Guardian, July 13, Manchester.– Nine dealers fined from two shillings
and sixpence to twenty shillings. Guardian, July 24, Rochdale.– Four dealers fined ten to twenty
shillings. Guardian, July 27, Bolton.– Twelve dealers and innkeepers condemned
to pay costs. Guardian, August 3, Bolton.– Three dealers fined two shillings and
sixpence, and five shillings. Guardian, August 10, Bolton.– One dealer fined five shillings.

And the same causes which make the working-class the chief sufferers from
frauds in the quality of goods make them the usual victims of frauds in the
question of quantity too.

The habitual food of the individual working-man naturally varies according
to his wages. The better-paid workers, especially those in whose families every
member is able to earn something, have good food as long as this state of
things lasts; meat daily and bacon and cheese for supper. Where wages are less,
meat is used only two or three times a week, and the proportion of bread and
potatoes increases. Descending gradually, we find the animal food reduced to a
small piece of bacon cut up with the potatoes; lower still, even this
disappears, and there remain only bread, cheese, porridge, and potatoes, until
on the lowest round of the ladder, among the Irish, potatoes form the sole
food, As an accompaniment, weak tea, with perhaps a little sugar, milk, or
spirits, is universally drunk. Tea is regarded in England, and even in Ireland,
as quite as indispensable as coffee in Germany, and where no tea is used, the
bitterest poverty reigns. But all this presupposes that the workman has work.
When he has none, he is wholly at the mercy of accident, and eats what is given
him, what he can beg or steal. And, if he gets nothing, he simply starves, as
we have seen. The quantity of food varies, of course, like its quality,
according to the rate of wages, so that among ill-paid workers, even if they
have no large families, hunger prevails in spite of full and regular work; and
the number of the ill-paid is very large. Especially in London, where the
competition of the workers rises with the increase of population, this class is
very numerous, but it is to be found in other towns as well. In these cases all
sorts of devices are used; potato parings, vegetable refuse, and rotten
vegetables [15]are eaten for want of
other food, and everything greedily gathered up which may possibly contain an
atom of nourishment. And, if the week's wages are used up before the end of the
week, it often enough happens that in the closing days the family gets only as
much food, if any, as is barely sufficient to keep off starvation. Of course
such a way of living unavoidably engenders a multitude of diseases, and when
these appear, when the father from whose work the family is chiefly supported,
whose physical exertion most demands nourishment, and who therefore first
succumbs – when the father is utterly disabled, then misery reaches its
height, and then the brutality with which society abandons its members, just
when their need is greatest, comes out fully into the light of day.

To sum up briefly the facts thus far cited. The great towns are chiefly
inhabited by working-people, since in the best case there is one bourgeois for
two workers, often for three, here and there for four; these workers have no
property whatsoever of their own, and live wholly upon wages, which usually go
from hand to mouth. Society, composed wholly of atoms, does not trouble itself
about them; leaves them to care for themselves and their families, yet supplies
them no means of doing this in an efficient and permanent manner. Every
working-man, even the best, is therefore constantly exposed to loss of work and
food, that is to death by starvation, and many perish in this way. The
dwellings of the workers are everywhere badly planned, badly built, and kept in
the worst condition, badly ventilated, damp, and unwholesome. The inhabitants
are confined to the smallest possible space, and at least one family usually
sleeps in each room. The interior arrangement of the dwellings is
poverty-stricken in various degrees, down to the utter absence of even the most
necessary furniture. The clothing of the workers, too, is generally scanty, and
that of great multitudes is in rags. The food is, in general, bad; often almost
unfit for use, and in many cases, at least at times, insufficient in quantity,
so that, in extreme cases, death by starvation results. Thus the working-class
of the great cities offers a graduated scale of conditions in life, in the best
cases a temporarily endurable existence for hard work and good wages, good and
endurable, that is, from the worker's standpoint; in the worst cases, bitter
want, reaching even homelessness and death by starvation. The average is much
nearer the worst case than the best. And this series does not fall into fixed
classes, so that one can say, this fraction of the working-class is well off,
has always been so, and remains so. If that is the case here and there, if
single branches of work have in general an advantage over others, yet the
condition of the workers in each branch is subject to such great fluctuations
that a single working-man may be so placed as to pass through the whole range
from comparative comfort to the extremest need, even to death by starvation,
while almost every English working-man can tell a tale of marked changes of
fortune. Let us examine the causes of this somewhat more closely.

NOTES

3. This applies to the time of sailing vessels. The Thames
now is a dreary collection of ugly steamers.– F. E.– Note by Engels to
the American edition of 1887
(1892) This was written nearly fifty years ago, in the days of the
picturesque sailing vessels. In so far as such ships still ply to and from
London they are now to be found only in the docks, while the river itself is
covered with ugly, sooty steamers.– Note by Engels to the German edition
of 1892.Return to Text

4. The description given below had already been written when
I came across an article in the Illuminated Magazine (October 1844)
dealing with the working-class districts in London which coincides – in many
places almost literally and everywhere in general tenor – with what I had
said. The article was entitled "The Dwellings of the Poor, from the notebook of
an M.D." – Note by Engels.Return to Text

6. Quoted by Dr. W. P. Alison. F.R.S.E., Fellow and late
President of the Royal College of Physicians, etc., etc. Observations on
the Management of the Poor in Scotland and its Effects on the Health of Great
Towns, Edinburgh. 1840. The author is a religious Tory, brother of the
historian, Archibald Alison.– Note by Engels.Return
to Text

7. Report to the Home Secretary from the Poor-Law
Commissioner, on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring
Classes in Great Britain, with Appendix. Presented to both Houses of
Parliament in July, 1842, 3 vols, Folio. Assembled and arranged from medical
reports by Edwin Chadwick, Secretary of the Poor-Law Commissioners. – Note
by EngelsReturn to Text

8. Arts and Artisans at Home and Abroad, by J. C.
Symons, Edinburgh, 1839. The author, as it seems, himself a Scotchman, is a
Liberal, and consequently fanatically opposed to every independent movement of
working-men. The passages here cited are to be found p. 116 et seq.–Note
by Engels.Return to Text

9. It must be borne in mind that these cellars are not mere
storing-rooms for rubbish, but dwellings of human beings.– Note by
Engels.Return to Text

10.The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working
Classes employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester. By James Ph.
Kay, M.D. 2nd Ed. 1852.
Dr. Kay confuses the working-class in general with the factory
workers, otherwise an excellent pamphlet.– Note by Engels.Return to Text

11. And yet an English Liberal wiseacre asserts, in the
Report of the Children's Employment Commission, that these courts are
the masterpiece of municipal architecture, because, like a multitude of little
parks, they improve ventilation, the circulation of air! Certainly, if each
court had two or four broad open entrances facing each other, through which the
air could pour; but they never have two, rarely one, and usually only a narrow
covered passage.– Note by Engels. Return to Text

12. Nassau W. Senior, Letters on the Factory Act to the
Rt. Hon., the President of the Board of Trade (Chas. Poulett Thomson,
Esq.), London, 1837, p. 24.– Note by Engels.Return
to Text

13. P. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of
England: its Moral, Social and Physical Condition, and the Changes which have
arisen from the Use of Steam Machinery; with an Examination of Infant Labour.
Fiat Justitia, 1855.– Depicting chiefly the state of the working-class in
Lancashire. The author is a Liberal, but wrote at a time when it was not a
feature of Liberalism to chant the happiness of the workers. He is therefore
unprejudiced, and can afford to have eyes for the evils of the present state of
things, and especially for the factory system. On the other hand, he wrote
before the Factories Enquiry Commission, and adopts from untrustworthy sources
many assertions afterwards refuted by the report of the Commission. This work,
although on the whole a valuable one, can therefore only be used with
discretion, especially as the author, like Kay, confuses the whole
working-class with the mill-hands. The history of the development of the
proletariat contained in the introduction to the present work, is chiefly taken
from this work of Gaskell's.– Note by Engels.Return
to Text